UO chief: Bellotti was asked to leave

University of Oregon athletic director Mike Bellotti did not step down voluntarily but was asked to resign by the university president, who on Tuesday called the $2.3 million settlement to Bellotti a “buyout” of a contract that was never put on paper.

UO President Richard Lariviere acknowledged in a press conference that he asked for Bellotti’s resignation and told the ex-football coach he would be replaced either way. That ran counter to earlier statements by the university, which at least implied that Bellotti was leaving of his own accord and gave no hint that he was, in fact, urged to leave.

Lariviere said the athletic department needed a new leader with experience handling the financial and business aspects of the sports programs and the ability to keep the department financially self-sufficient.

Lariviere also said the Bellotti payout would come from donor funds — the university earlier said it would come from general athletic department revenue — and that the source would be a mixture of new money donated specifically for the payment and previous donations. He said it would not be drawn from the athletic department’s Legacy Fund, which is primarily used as a backstop for bond payments on the UO’s new $227 million basketball arena.

And the UO president acknowledged that the athletic department and other staff botched Bellotti’s move from coach to athletic director by failing to get the deal in writing. He pledged to make any changes needed to bring the university’s business practices up to accepted standards, including changes in how it responds to public records requests.

“It is this university’s business to practice good business,” Lariviere said. “And it will do so.”

Lariviere made his comments as the UO sought to contain a widening controversy over Bellotti’s planned departure and the large payout, which he will receive even though he will have been in the post less than a year when he steps down April 20. The lack of any written contract justifying the settlement, plus incorrect or misleading statements from the university about Bellotti’s deal, added to the controversy.

The blowup prompted two ongoing state investigations, one by the state Board of Higher Education and the other by the attorney general’s office.

The controversy also has extended a long stretch of bad publicity for the university and its athletic department. Just before the revelations about Bellotti’s contract, several football players pleaded guilty to a variety of criminal charges stemming from incidents involving burglary, brawling and drunken driving.

The Bellotti controversy began in March, when the popular ex-coach announced he planned to leave the athletic director job to become an on-air analyst for cable sports network ESPN. Bellotti had earlier built a reputation as a respected and successful football coach, amassing the most wins in UO history and taking the Ducks to bowl games 12 times in 14 years.

In his first public comments on the matter, Lariviere on Tuesday said he urged Bellotti to take the ESPN job. He said that even before that discussion, he had decided the athletic department needed new leadership and told Bellotti he would soon seek a change.

“I told Mike that we were going to have a change of athletic directors,” Lariviere said. “I was struggling with how and when to effect that when the ESPN deal came up, and I felt that I had to explain to Mike what the options were before he made his decision regarding ESPN.”

It was only after the two began talking about the terms for Bellotti’s departure, Lariviere said, that they found out that the university had failed to draw up a contract setting out the terms of Bellotti’s employment as AD. The two then worked out the settlement based on earlier conversations between Bellotti and previous athletic director, Pat Kilkenny.

“What we had to do was sit down and look at the promises that had been made to Mike, undocumented though they may have been, and come to what we thought was the fairest accommodation possible,” Lariviere said. “It was not certainly everything that Mike wanted and it was more than I wanted, but I think it was a fair and reasonable discharge of the university’s obligation.”

The $2.3 million breaks down into $1.3 million for the next two years of Bellotti’s $675,000 annual AD salary, plus a $1 million payment on top of his regular salary for the first year, a special bonus meant to bring his first-year pay up to what he had been earning as head coach, according to the university. As coach, Bellotti had a rolling, five-year contract paying him almost $2 million a year.

Bellotti believes he was promised a five-year contract as athletic director — which would have entitled him to an even greater buyout, given that Lariviere wanted him out. But state rules only allow three-year employment contacts unless the chancellor of the Oregon University System approves a longer deal.

Bellotti said he was led to believe that permission was being sought. But the university did not do that.

“You have to do certain things with the state system to get that done. We did not do that,” Bellotti said. “How that fell down and fell through the cracks I do not know. I know I can’t write my own contract.”

All together, combining Bellotti’s first-year pay of $975,000 with the $2.3 million settlement, the university will pay the former coach about $3.2 million for about a year’s worth of work as athletic director. Bellotti said he didn’t feel that was out of line.

“I didn’t take anything that wasn’t owed to me,” he said.

“My relationship with the university is solid and intact,” he said. “I will continue to be a supporter of the university, I’ll be involved in fundraising in the future, I’ll be involved in events within the athletic department and probably even the university itself.”

Lariviere also went out of his way to praise Bellotti and stress that he should bear no blame for the university’s failings.

“I want to make it clear that I encouraged his move to ESPN and I made the decision to secure new leadership for the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics,” Lariviere said in a statement distributed before the press conference. “I take full responsibility for the ambiguity around Mike’s departure.”

The university’s legal department late last month said it didn’t realize that there was no contract for Bellotti until last winter, after Bellotti told Lariviere of the ESPN job possibility. However, The Register-Guard had been asking the legal department since the previous summer for the document but received no reply. The newspaper submitted requests for the contract on June 25 and Nov. 11, and again on Jan. 14.

Asked about the UO’s failure to respond to those requests and the difficulty of getting public records in the past, Lariviere acknowledged the university has not lived up to the spirit of the open records law and pledged changes.

“As a result of our discoveries in this, we are going to change a lot of the university’s practices,” Lariviere said. “At this point I can’t tell you exactly what the response will be to any individual request, but I can tell you we will be as responsive, open and transparent as we possibly can be.”

“I told Mike that we were going to have a change of athletic directors.”